# mathr

## Monotone at Mozilla Festival

My video piece Monotone has been accepted to the Mozilla Festival art exhibition. Mozilla Festival 2016 takes place October 28-30, at Ravensbourne College, London.

Since submitting the pre-rendered video loop I've been working on improving the real-time rendering mode of the Monotone software. The main bottle-neck at this time is the histogram equalisation to take the high dynamic range calculations down to a low dynamic range image for display. I did manage to get a large speed boost by calculating the histogram on a $$\frac{1}{4} \times \frac{1}{4}$$ downscaled image, but on my hardware it only achieves $$\frac{1}{2} \times \frac{1}{2}$$ of the desired resolution (HD 1920x1080). On my NVIDIA GTX 550 Ti with 192 CUDA cores I get 960x540 at 30 frames per second. Recent hardware has 1000s of cores, so perhaps it's just a matter of throwing more grunt at the problem.

If you want to try it (and have OpenGL 4 capable hardware, and development headers installed for GLFW and JACK, among other things; only tested on Debian):

git clone https://code.mathr.co.uk/monotone.git
git clone https://code.mathr.co.uk/clive.git
cd monotone/src
make
./monotone

You can also browse the monotone source code repository. If you do have a significantly more powerful GPU than me, you can try to edit the source code monotone.cpp to change "#define SCALE 2" to "#define SCALE 1", which will make it target 1920x1080 instead of half that in each dimension. I'd love to hear back if you get it working (or if you have trouble getting it running, maybe I can help).

UPDATE here are some photos, the projection was really impressive, so I'm satisfied even though the sound aspect was absent:

The festival was pretty interesting, many many things all going on at once. Highlight was the Sonic Pi workshop (though I spent most of the time dist-upgrade-ing to Debian Stretch so I could install it), and the Nature In Code workshop was also interesting (though it was packed full and uncomfortable so I didn't attend the full session).